And that, Schlurn told himself, is what I’m supposed to sell the Pentagon as a desirable new neighbor. Lord, deliver me from this. How do I get out of this?
And then, in the depths of his sweaty despair, he suddenly remembered that little piece of paper in his jacket pocket, the reminder from Al Metz, delivered by Carson’s secretary. His hand came down from his mouth. His head lifted. His spine straightened. “Green Meadow,” he said.
They all gave him the same blank stare. Finally, it was Carson’s number two, Harrison, who said, “What about it?”
Schlurn turned to Tony Potter. “Your Unitronic is connected with Anglo Dutch, isn’t it?”
Tony smiled. “We are their creature,” he said.
“And isn’t Anglo Dutch one of the partners in the consortium that owns Green Meadow?”
Now they got it, and they stared at him as though he’d completely lost his mind. Again, it was Harrison who first found voice: “Congressman, Green Meadow is a nuclear power plant.”
“Of course, it is, I know that, I had more than a little to do with making the state adjust some of its regulations so the thing could be built in the first place.”
Harrison shook his head. “You’re suggesting we take a man who makes explosions and put him in a nuclear power plant?”
“Why not?” Schlurn was fired by his idea now, and could defend it as though before the entire House. “God knows the place is used to explosions, that’s what a nuclear power plant is, an endless series of controlled explosions from which we draw off useful power. If it’s possible to build Dr. Philpott a laboratory that would contain any explosion he might come up with, if you’re saying we could do that at an army base, then why not at a nuclear power plant? And the corporate entities involved are interconnected: Unitronic, Anglo Dutch. No complexities of the kind you’d get if it were a government installation.”
Carson, brow corrugated with doubt, turned to Tony. “What do you think, Tony?”
“At first blush,” Tony answered, flashing Schlurn a forgive-me smile, “the idea sounds absolutely bloody bonkers. But if it’s possible to make the lab at all safe, then why not at Green Meadow? And our Marlon would be in a congenial atmosphere there, among like-minded chaps.”
“Exactly,” Schlurn said, as though he’d thought of that argument himself, which he hadn’t.
Hope smoothed Carson’s brow. “Tony? You think it’s possible?”
“Let me make a few phone calls,” Tony answered. “Bruit the idea around a bit. Having our chief researcher actually inside one of our own operations... Yes, let me see what may be done.”
Carson smiled at his guests. “I feel calmer already,” he said.
Ananayel
Here is the thing I’ve learned about the humans. Everything they do is motivated by a crazy quilt of reasons. Almost never do they perform an act merely because it’s the most sensible thing to do at the moment. There are always political reasons as well, or social reasons, or emotional reasons, or religious reasons, or financial reasons, or reasons of prejudice...
Oh, who knows? They wind up doing the wrong thing, usually, is the point, even though that small rational part inside them will briefly have shown the right road to take. A human who can’t ignore common sense to leap firmly into the saddle of the wrong horse is a pretty poor example of the species, all in all.
Me? I was the voice on the phone. I wanted Congressman Schlurn to have Green Meadow in his mind, so I put it in his pocket. To help his reason find, as usual, the wrong action.
11
Kitchen staff were not wanted up on deck. The Europeans paying for this ocean experience in the great world were not supposed to have their vacation interludes spoiled by the sight of Oriental riffraff.
So that was yet another way in which Kwan was wrong for the job. He was middle class, educated, intelligent, gregarious. Down in the kitchens, in what was almost literally the bowels of the ship, surrounded by uneducated illiterate rural peasants with whom he shared absolutely nothing but race, Kwan was bored, frustrated, silenced, imprisoned in his own persona. He had nothing to say to his co-workers and they, God knows, had nothing to say to him.
The kitchens were beneath the dining rooms, one deck below. All food was brought up to the passengers by waiters riding escalators, and for the first few weeks, until he found his own private route, Kwan had often lifted his head from his pot-scrubbing to gaze toward that moving staircase, rising endlessly from this steamy hell to the heaven of easy laughter, good food, intelligent conversation, and beautiful women. Beautiful women: that was probably the hardest deprivation of all.
Kitchen staff were housed in small four-man interior cabins on the same deck as the kitchens. From his room, Kwan could go forward along the narrow long corridor — yellow-painted metal, glaring light bulbs overhead in screened enclosures like catchers’ masks — to the kitchen and the deep sink where he spent his working hours six days a week, or he could go aft an even longer way and eventually out through a heavy metal bulkhead door to a small oval deck.
This was the kitchen staff’s outside exercise area, but few of them ever came out here. Not that very much concern had gone into making the place either useful or attractive. It was an empty space, ringed by a rusty railing. The bumpy metal deck was thickly painted in dark green with rust showing through. Out here, there was a great rush of engine noise and spray-drenched wind, a smell of oil mixed with the clean tang of sea, and the great empty horizon slowly seesawing miles and miles away over the indifferent hungry ocean.
And a ladder.
Afterward, it seemed to Kwan it had taken him far too long, weeks, to notice that ladder, those metal rungs bolted to the skin of the Star Voyager, leading upward to the next setback two decks above. Placed at the farthest starboard edge of this lower deck, the rungs marched up past the picture window of a sternward bar, and then to some unimaginable area reserved for passengers. Kwan saw it, at last, and knew he would have to go up.
Not the escalators; only the waiters were permitted on the escalators, and only while at work. Not the elevators; kitchen staff were forbidden to use them at any time, except for medical emergency, and even then to be accompanied by a ship’s officer. But this ladder; this was Kwan’s route out of hell.
The first time he climbed, frightened, his tense fingers clutching the cold rough metal of the rungs, was a blustery morning when few passengers would be outside and when the bar with the picture window was not yet open. That climb had merely been exploratory, informational. Once he had climbed high enough to see what was beyond the ladder, once he could peek over the level of that upper deck, he stopped, the ship’s vibrations running through his body, and drank it in.
A passenger promenade, one that made a great oval all around the ship. Kwan was startled to see joggers pounding by, even in weather like this. The first of them to thud past, a trim thirtyish man with a fierce inward expression, had scared Kwan mightily, but then he realized the joggers were so thoroughly involved with the interior of their own bodies and minds that they were hardly aware of the outside world at all. A tiny face at the lower right of their peripheral vision made no impact on them.
They won’t jog at night, Kwan told himself, and climbed back down.
His day off was Tuesday. The other six days he worked from eight till eleven in the morning, from one till four in the afternoon, and again from seven till eleven at night, sometimes later. So Tuesday was the only time he’d be able to use his sudden access to what he thought of as the real world.